A traditional grocery shopping experience involves a customer taking a shopping cart or shopping basket near the entrance of a store, travelling through the store to items to be purchased and taking items from their locations on shelves, end caps and other product displays. Upon completion of the selection of items, the shopper proceeds to an assisted checkout or self-service checkout lane where bar codes are scanned on each item, prices are looked up in a price look-up (PLU) table by a point of sale (POS) terminal, and a bill is generated. Payment is then made. Items are bagged and a receipt is provided to the customer.
A variety of smart cart and smart shelf concepts have been proposed, but have not been widely adapted presumably as a result of considerations, such as high costs of implementation and the like. For example, various patents address cart arrangements where a customer scans a bar code on each item as it is added to or removed from a cart. Alternative sensing arrangements, such as RFID sensing, have also been proposed in this context. As an example of a smart shelf arrangement, various arrangements have been addressed where, as an item is removed from a shelf, the removal is sensed.